Matteo Gherardini, born in Rome in 1980, graduated from Roma Tre DAMS in 2006 with a thesis in African American culture and its depiction in north-American cinema. In the same year, he began working as an assistant editor at the film production company Indigo Film, where he worked with editors Ilaria Frajoli and Aline Hervé. After several jobs in this role, working on documentary and feature films directed by Pietro Marcello, Andrea Molaioli, Paolo Sorrentino, and Leonardo Di Costanzo, he focused on documentary cinema.

In 2009, he edited The Earthquake by Paolo Pisanelli, with whom he collaborates regularly, editing many other works directed by the filmmaker from Apulia. He has been working in the organization of the Festa di Cinema del reale, a documentary film festival now at its 19^th year, since 2011.

He has worked for many years with film director and photographer Cecilia Mangini. He was the editor of Vietnam Will Be Free, co-directed by Pisanelli and Mangini, as well as of the documentaries The World in Shots and Grazia Deledda la rivoluzionaria.

Meanwhile, he edited more feature films and short documentaries directed by Pierfrancesco Li Donni (Loro di Napoli, Massimino, Our Road), Francesco Barnabei (La luna che vorrei), and Federico Savonitto and Ruben Monterosso (Il piano segreto) among others. Over the years, films edited by Gherardini have screened in several Italian and international film festivals (Venice Film Festival, IFFR Rotterdam, IDFA, Cinema du réel, Festa del Cinema di Roma, Doc Lisboa, and Sevilla Film Festival, just to name a few).

Desidera Rayner has worked as an editor for over twenty years. She obtained a degree in Philosophy from Rome University Sapienza. After some work experience in journalism (beginning in L’Espresso New York correspondents’ offices and then in Rome for Rai News 24), she was an author for the Rai 3 TV show Blob and the Rai Radio 3 radio show Golem. She then specialized in the editing of auteur documentaries, such as Agostino Ferrente’s The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio (2006), Chiara Bondì’s and Isabel Achaval’s Las Leonas (2022), and films, including Luigi Lo Cascio’s The Ideal City (2012), Valerio Mieli’s Ricordi? (2018), and Dario Albertini’s Anima bella (2022).